In an article in Spacing a few years ago (“Letters to a park,” Spacing, Winter/Spring 2007), Jessica Johnston lamented not being able to send mail to her favourite park. Although many parks have street addresses, Canada Post told her that “Parks aren’t customers … We can’t deliver to the third oak tree.” Well, she might have more luck getting that letter to the third oak tree now that there’s an actual mailbox tacked onto a signpost in Sunnybrook Park:
Despite riding by here quite regularly, I’d never noticed this mailbox until I saw a Canada Post truck pull up and deliver a load of mail to it this morning. A city employee who happened to be passing by while I was taking pictures said that it’s a shared mailbox for Sunnybrook Stables and the city works yard tucked in at the north end of the park below the sports fields. Canada Post won’t deliver mail all the way up the road and it’s too dangerous to stop at a mailbox placed at high-speed Leslie Street, so they reached a compromise with this mailbox located almost 200 metres inside the park where there’s room to safely stop and turn the mail truck around without having to reverse up the roadway. He also said that this particular box is new, having replaced the original wooden one that was installed in the same location last September. And I do remember seeing the old wooden one on this post, but never twigged to the possibility that it was for mail delivery.